It makes me a bit crazy on the Left Coast to see what Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and Haight Street in San Francisco have become. However, I hope never to become calcified and in my attitudes. Britney, Cristina, Justin and Beyonce aren't the only games in town.

It has ever been a small group of eccentrics (meaning, "off-center," I believe) who have kept creative expression alive. They are always around somewhere under the mainstream cultural radar, just as there were groups of people who flourished on Telegraph, the Haight, and in the Village for a few brief years before their way-out ways were co-opted, sanitized and commercialized.

Miriam